Website Usability Testing and Market Research
In order to ensure your website is built for success you must test your website. Usability testing of web sites is an essential element of quality assurance and a true test of how visitors actually use your web site.
Primary Market Research Services
Based on our clients' needs, Atomic Design provides custom research and primary market research services.
The primary market research services fall into three main categories:
Observation - gaining information by monitoring people's behavior in relevant situations. Actions often speak louder than words.
Experimentation - testing consumers' and buyers' reactions through a service or in a relaxed environment, which is guided by an expert.
Survey - a non-experimental study for gathering information, without detailed verification, on the activity being examined. Surveys can be both qualitative and quantitative depending on the number of customers surveyed and the nature of the survey.
Website Usability
Based on your targeted demographic we feel that website usability testing is an important part of the development process.
Website Usability can be defined as the amount of success a user experiences while interacting with a website. In other words, it is the extent to which a user can achieve the desired goal during a visit to a particular website.
Some of its factors that contribute to the ease of use include:
- Page layout consistency throughout the website
- An easily identifiable search mechanism to enable immediate retrieval of information
- Hypertext links that allow immediate access to specific information on that page or any other page in the site
- The inclusion of a site map that acts as a hyper linked table of contents for the entire website
- The use of legible fonts and an adequate use of color to highlight and organize information and/or features
- A bail-out feature for an immediate exit when necessary
Usability Testing
Usability testing is the testing and validation of navigation, interface, prototype ideas, and site structure. The purpose of usability testing is to understand how customers use the site and why they use it as they do.
Usability can be measured in terms of:
EFFECTIVENESS - number of tasks successfully completed vs. number of tasks attempted
EFFICIENCY - the amount of time to complete a task
SATISFACTION - rating users' experience while performing the task
Usability Testing Process
1. Literature review and market demographics research
2. Generate the pool of participants with variety of Internet skills and experiences. The best people to invite are those who are going to need the service you are providing in the near future or who have used a competing service in the recent past.
3. Questionnaire development. Develop a questionnaire to generate background and eligibility information on each participant. The information required: contact information, information on lifestyle, educational background, and computer experience (See attachment A).
4. Decide which features to test, consider website features that are
- Used often
- New
- Highly publicized
- Considered troublesome, based on feedback from earlier versions
- Potentially dangerous or have bad side effects if used incorrectly
- Considered important by users
5. Prioritize the features and pick the top 5
6. Creating tasks that will exercise the top five features (Attachment B). Good tasks should be:
- Reasonable. They should be typical of the kinds of things that people will do.
- Described in terms of end goals. Give participants a lifelike situation. Phrase your task as something that's related to the evaluator's life.
- Specific. For consistency between evaluators and to focus the task on the parts of the product you're interested in testing, the task should have a specific end goal
- Doable. If your site has forks only, don't ask people to find knives.
- In a realistic sequence. Tasks should flow like an actual session with the product. So a shopping site could have a browsing task followed by a search task that's related to a selection task that flows into a purchasing task.
- Domain neutral. The ideal task is something that everyone who tests the interface knows something about, but no one knows a lot about.
- A reasonable length. Most features are not so complex that to use them takes more than 10 minutes. Three things should determine the duration of a task: the total length of the interview, its structure, and the complexity of the features you're testing.
7. Estimating each task's time
8. Writing a script. This script is divided into three parts: the introduction and preliminary interview, the tasks, and
the wrap-up.
9. Session #1 - Discuss the intent of the research, time requirements, scheduling of individual sessions. Participants complete an informed consent agreement and the questionnaire.
10. Session # 2 - The session involves a one-on-one meeting to provide for data collection in a naturalistic environment. The participant is asked to engage in discussion, verbalize thoughts, ask questions, make statements about her actions, or indicate preferences as she navigates through the website.
11. Session # 3 - The final session involves the entire group. The purpose of the session is to engage participants in a discussion of the factors identified during the study and trends that emerged
12. Analyze the results
13. Draw conclusions
View a sample website usability questionnaire